


My Face is Tired

by carbonfromstars



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Emotions, Exhaustion, Light Angst, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-07
Updated: 2017-06-07
Packaged: 2018-11-10 02:40:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11118171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carbonfromstars/pseuds/carbonfromstars
Summary: Foster Addison is tired and just wants to rest after an exceedingly long day.





	My Face is Tired

**Author's Note:**

> First time posting... well anything, really. Thanks for reading. *waves*

“Sorry my face is tired from dealing with… everything.”

“Did you really say that to the pathfinder?” Kesh’s chortle followed Addison back to her quarters. The Nexus Superintendent's laugher is powerful enough to shake bulkheads, but it is her incredulity that carries the most sting. Kesh has been working just as hard as the rest of them, if not harder, to keep the Nexus from splitting apart at the seams. She has to be just as tired, doesn’t she?

Addison steps through the doorway into the darkened apartment. It was almost always dark in here; everything about the space screams that its inhabitant hardly spends any time there. Not bothering with the lights, she navigates the room almost by memory, her only aid the low light that manages to break through the blinds pulled across the windows.

Stopping briefly to fumble for a glass, she pours herself a drink. The cool water slakes her thirst and helps to clear her head, but it does nothing against the crushing fatigue pushing down on her. Refilling the glass she collapses onto the couch. The bed would have been her first choice, but the couch serves just as well and it’s closer. After long hours spent standing in Operations her legs are on the verge of surrendering to gravity.

She is tired. So unbelievably tired. Addison has worked on long term, high stakes projects before, but this is completely different from any of those. Even though they feel a lifetime away, it’s only been a year. An entire year of things going wrong; of stareing their impending deaths in the face. Then one finally shows up: a Pathfinder. Not even the right fucking one, but it’s still something. Isn’t it?

Closing her eyes, she sighs. Bringing the glass to her lips, she once more gains a small amount of relief, even if it is fleeting. What she needs is sleep, but she knows she would just wake up as tired as she always is. It almost feels as if another six hundred years of sleep wouldn’t even help.

What she misses most of all is the sense of hope, the hope they all felt climbing into their stasis pods for the long sleep through dark space. Before Heleus; before the scourge.

A year. An entire year of trying to make it in Heleus and always the same results: failed expeditions to so called Golden Worlds, wasted resources, death. All of it summed up as lower numbers in her reports. Even the uprising was broken down as numbers; numbers that are always trending downwards. They just have to make the numbers work. It sounds so beguilingly simple, but it never is. They just keep failing and the numbers in her ledgers just keep falling.

She sighs, and this time it feels like everything is being pulled out of her. She tried, God, how she had tried, and for what? Just more failure.

At first she thought that dealing with everything as numbers would make it easier. That the levels of abstraction would keep her sane. But there was no escaping what the numbers stood for: less food, less power, and fewer faces in the corridors or at their stations in operations. And every time she receives a well organized report, detailing exactly how much each failure has cost them.

Now there is a pathfinder. Another Ryder just as stubborn and foolhardy as the one that first dropped into her life. How dare he die.

She growls into the darkness, “God dammit, Alec.”  
He should have known better, that bastard. What they need is an experienced hand to guide them, to stand up to Tann and the others, not a damn child. She brings her fist smashing down into the couch in futility. It doesn’t matter now, what’s done is done. Alec is dead and the transfer is complete. Nothing she does can change that. Already, the Tempest is speeding its way towards Eos, maybe their biggest failure since the decision to even make this insane trip to Andromeda in the first place. They haven’t even been able to recover the bodies of those they lost in the first two attempts to tame Eos’s wilderness.

Maybe the Pathfinder will succeed, but if she is honest with herself the likelihood of that is quite low. Even though she wants Ryder to pull it off, to put the Initiative back on track, it is much more probable that she will be getting yet another report and the numbers will keep going down.

Just thinking about it brings her exhaustion crashing back down upon her. Her entire body aches, sore muscles screaming for sleep. She is just so tired. Most of all she is tired of presenting a calm face to the rest of the Nexus. Not a brave one, but at the very least an iron-willed one. As tired as she is she can’t show how scared she is, not with morale as low as it has fallen. Having an ark and a pathfinder finally show helps, but unless there are results, and soon, morale will drop again and who knows how low it will reach this time.

If that happens she doesn’t know if she can keep it up. Everyone knows that their situation is dire, but not everyone knows just how close to the brink they are. Tann knows, but morale boosting isn’t really his expertise. His attempts usually have the opposite effect. Kesh and Kandros prefer to bury themselves in work, but they have tangible targets and goals they can tackle head on. Her team was meant to be organizing colonies and setting up outposts, and they have failed at every turn. Now they spend their time tracking the results of their failures.

Even so, it’s all she can do to keep from showing that the specter of their failure stalks her through the corridors of the Nexus, following her wherever she goes. So instead she puts up a mask, to bury the despair under the surface. It takes so much energy to keep the mask from cracking, and without it her team would be able to see just how close to total failure they are. So, yes, she is tired. And despite how crazy it sounds, her face is tired. All she wants to do is rest, really rest.

Maybe things will be better in the morning. After all, now they have a pathfinder. Can it hurt to hope one more time?  
“Probably,” she snorts to no one. But still, maybe she has just enough energy left to try.

Finally, in the dark, sleep wins out. She’ll see where the numbers are in the morning.


End file.
